CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, October 08, 2014

Crossing The Line: Don’t Overlook Point Source Approaches

Pro Sound Web: It wasn’t too many years ago that most shows were supported with trapezoidal point-source loudspeakers that were either horn loaded or front loaded. There were numerous touring companies providing proprietary loudspeaker systems, some well engineered and some not so well.

1 comment:

Mike Vultaggio said...

I think that this article raises some very good points regarding the use of line arrays rather than point source speakers for sound reinforcement. In my experience I have been given the chance to work with both and have sort of developed an attachment to line arrays. This is largely due to the fact that in my professional sound career thus far I have primarily used line arrays rather than point source mainly because they are the type of boxes that the places that I have worked at have used. Reading this article brings back a memory from high school, my first time truly engineering a system from scratch. It was my junior year and the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and my high school was having a big dedication ceremony for a memorial that was installed on our campus. The whole main parking lot was estimated to be filled and there would be several speeches, a performance by the choir, and a performance by the marching band. Clearly a big rig was needed to fill such a space and we had all the mics we needed as well as our trusty Soundcraft Vi4 at FOH, we just needed the speakers to make it all happen. When we asked if we could rent a small line array system we were told that no money was budgeted for sound and therefore we had to work with what we had. This was about 10 small point source speakers and 2 larger point source speakers. With the donation of some scaffolding from a local company we were able to set up a make shift left-right system that reached pretty damn far. We also ground stacked some left-right mains and made use of center fills to fill in the front rows and I tell you it sounded pretty great for what it was. I would have to say that that system is one of my favorite that I have ever designed because it is one that I built from nothing and did a great job doing what we needed it to do.